On Dec 21, 2007 10:53 AM, Debarshi 'Rishi' Ray <debarshi ray gmail com> wrote:
> I am aware of them, but was told that those are not "official Fedora"
> releases. Can we do this within Fedora itself? Or would that be too
> much of a pain?
How important is "official" to you? And what does "official" actually mean?
Is there no room for very active Fedora community groups to take
ownership for some of the technical services to provide an overall
wider set of services? If Fedora as a project started making the
re-spins instead of Unity, aren't we essential taking control away
from them for doing a good job and providing a popular service? Is
that necessarily the best thing to do for the overall health of the
community?
My understanding is the Re-spins are built using all Fedora built
packages. But because they don't go through the same release-eng
process as our gold releases, they aren't "Official." If they went
through they same process...they'd be gold releases and not re-spins
and would take as as much (or close) effort to put together as a gold
release.
So overall the Re-spins are some sort of middle ground that we as a
Project don't really know how to position in our offerings. We care
and stress the importance of the release process that leads to gold
releases. We want people to make use of those releases exactly because
we know more about how those packages interact together as compared to
updated packages. But at the same time we know Re-spins have value
for people who are bitten by bugs in the gold releases, or who want to
save band by not having to download packages twice. We also like the
fact Unity is out there breaking trails doing innovative stuff, self
organization of community to drive innovation isn't a bad thing.
So we have to be careful and deliberate about how we deal with
re-spins. We want to craft a message that says, gold releases are
what we prefer you use because we believe in the process leading up to
those releases, but re-spins are a value-added option provided by our
innovative community that we have absolutely no problems with you
trying, but we can't vouch for as strongly as the gold releases.
Personally I think the re-spins are a fabulous service that Unity is
offering. Have I ever used them, nope.... not once... I'm an early
adopter and active tester leading up to the gold releases. So I'm
exactly the person a re-spin doesn't have a lot of value for.
-jef